Valentine Spindle

Well I goofed, I'm allowed once in awhile :( Good thing Dale caught this before I posted the pictures..........

The tiny spindle I called Cranberry is our Valentine spindle....... the wood company calls it Cranberry but I am calling it "Razzle Dazzle Red". I am listing 3 of them at this time, we will be making more of them. If you want one in a larger size email me and I'll let the boss know. I am going to list them individually because each one has its own color design and elements. The color is a cross between a wine and a red color. Its a real sweetheart of a spindle.

Also take a look at the Artic Blue spindles you can almost see the aurora borealis in them.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly news.....

The Good news is.........yes, we are going to continue to make spindles. I have been asked that a lot lately!!?? "Are you going to continue to make spindles??" Where is that coming from I wonder? .......Anyway the good news is Yes, we are! I will continue to let you know here before I list news spindles. I will be listing a few tiny spindles later today in fact. We were able to get some more of the Cobalt Blue dymondwood and I will have 3 to list today in tiny. There will be two other new colors to list also a lighter Artic Blue and a new Cranberry color.

The Bad news is that Dale is tired and so production has been slow...also the barn is cold even though I solved his cold feet problem. :) We are going to rest a bit this month, so we are going on semi-vacation mode. I will list a few spindles when he feels like going out to work in the barn. That means the listings for spindles will be slim this month but there will be listings...see the good news above.

The Ugly, I have been putting this off and can no longer put it off.....postal rates have risen and I am going to have to go up on shipping cost....ugh! I hate doing that!

So there you have it.........all the news that is news :)

More spindles......

I will be posting several medium dymondwood spindles later tonight if you have been waiting for them here they are.......some new colors and some old colors.

We apologize for taking so long to make spindles right now......it is cold in the barn! We did get it insulated and we do have heat out there but the cold cement floor even with thick pads is hard on our feet and legs. So we are doing the best we can and sitting a lot.

Note: If we ever build another barn with a cement floor we need to put heat pipes in the floor. LOL! Yeah! like that's gonna happen!

Oh! We have also listed more of the Limited Edition Spindles, we are on numbers 6 through 11 at this time.....so you still have time to get one. We will have our next special spindle ready in a week or so...stay tuned.

NOTE: The Limited Edition Anniversary spindle will be the only one numbered all other special spindles this year will NOT be numbered.

Time Passes

Time passes very quickly as we all know very well.....

I have had a etsy shop since August of 2007, I opened it in hopes of selling some finished items and spun yarn. I sold a few things and then simply forgot I even had a etsy shop when things quit selling. Flash forward to this time last year....I decided to close the shop down since nothing was happening and I was just taking up space some else could use. Dale (aka the boss) said I should try it again to see if things had changed. We had been making the bigger Turkish spindles and selling them locally at this time. I asked Dale for a tiny spindle that I could hang from the rear view mirror on my new vehicle so I could find it easier in the parking lot. He made a top whorl drop spindle about 4 inches long, it was OK but I wanted something different, besides it doesn't spin yarn.
I finally convinced him to make a tiny Turkish spindle, imagine my surprise when it actually spun yarn...well thread. LOL! I thought this would be a neat item to add to the etsy site someone else might want a car ornament/ spindle to use in case of a spinning melt down while waiting in traffic. The first Turkish spindle listed was made entirely of Maple and was a real lightweight, it weighed .37 ounces, it was 4-1/2 inches long with a arm length of 2 inches. It was listed on January 27th and sold on February 3rd to "Gullate". This was followed by 2 more spindles on the 4th and another on the 5th of February. Dale was surprised and amazed when I told him I needed more spindles and people were actually writing us and asking for more! LOL! He didn't believe me until I showed him the emails and paypal payments. The little tiny spindle #6 in the photo above was our first spindle sold on etsy. So even though I have been on etsy since 2007, we consider February the 3rd our 1 year anniversary on etsy. Just by coincidence February the 4th is Dale's 50 something birthday.


In honor of this we have made a special limited edition tiny Turkish spindle. We sold 14 spindles back in February of last year, we are limiting this special edition to 15 spindles....one for luck. I will take special orders on this spindle, we are letting out blog followers know about it first. Let me know you want one and I will send you a paypal invoice...the price for this one time spindle is $ 40.00 and that includes shipping to US only, add an additional $5.00 for International orders.

This spindle will arrive with some very special fiber......Number 1 is already reserved......14 are left!

Remember email me for a invoice to purchase this spindle. Threadsthrutime AT cox DOT net (make sure to replace the AT and Dot with the correct symbols)

It is made with a Osage Orange shaft, and the whorl is made of Gaboon Ebony. Gaboon Ebony is one of the darkest, blackest ebonys and therefore the most expensive ebony sold. We have used it in small amounts on shafts but we have never, nor will we ever again use it for whorls. They are 4-1/2 inches long, 2-1/2 inches wide and weigh 0.7 ounces.

Note: I will list these on etsy this weekend sometime.....

Psssst! Psssst! We have other special spindles planed for the remainder of the year the next one is a real sweetheart. I will try to let you know a day or two before I list them on etsy.........

NEWS, NEWS, AND SOME MORE NEWS

I will be listing some tiny dymondwood spindles later in the day, we have some new colors and old colors to list. It will be a few days before I have any Mediums to list.

We are working on several things all at once and it seems to have slowed us down a bit on production. Please be patient with us.......

We are going to have several themed spindles this year in limited numbers, the first of which will be listed in a day or two. Those reading the blog will have the first chance to buy and then I will list any remaining spindles on etsy.

I'm still working on my camera issues with lighting and hope to have that resolved soon so I can post more fibers. The lighting problems seem to affect the fibers only for some reason the spindles come out alright ....at least on my monitor they do.

Stay warm and stay tuned for more spindle news..........

Wood Density 101

I am going to attempt to answer a few wood questions as time allows. We get this one a lot so I thought I would begin with it : I love the colors on this spindle, is there any way you can make the exact same one but make it weigh more/less?
The short answer is no.....the longer answer is, it has to do with the density of the wood. Some woods have a closer grain then others which determines how heavy or light the wood will be. The grain of the wood also effects the density of the woods. If a wood is slow growing it is going to be denser then other woods......ebony, teak, pink ivory, ligium vitae, are all very dense woods. Ash, pine, aspen, cypress, almost all spalted woods, mahogany, are all fast growing light weight woods. So unless we can make the tree grow slower we can't change the density or weight of the wood pieces.
Another consideration is where the wood comes from on the tree, heart wood is denser then sap wood which is the outer ring of the tree. Heart wood is actually a dead wood where the wood is beginning to dry out, the growth of the tree is in the sap wood. You can identify heart wood as it is usually the darkest part of the wood. So we sometimes have the same type of wood with different weights, because one piece may have come from the outer rings and another piece may have been closer to the inner heart wood.
There are also various types of laminated woods, we use several name brands one of them is Dymondwood. There is a weight difference between the different brands and has to do with the adhesive used on the various woods. Dymondwood, uses a polyester resign to saturate and bond the wood veneers together creating a dense block of wood. Others brands use a wood glue to bond the veneers together creating a lighter block of wood. This is why some of the color wood spindles weigh more then others, we can not change the weight on these anymore then we could change the weight on the other woods we use.
We hope this answers your spindle weight question if there is anything I can clarify, please let me know and I will answer it in another post.